How Our Church Became Reformed (Pt 3)

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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How Our Church Became Reformed (Pt 4)

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the word of God and the doctrines of grace.

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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who is no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Calvinists.

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Today is August 12th, 2020.

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If you're following along in our daily Bible reading, today we're going to be reading Acts chapter 15.

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Very important passage.

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It's the passage that talks about the Jerusalem Council, the importance of the receiving in of Gentiles into the kingdom, and the the equality of Jews and Gentiles in the new covenant.

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So if you're reading along with us, please read Acts 15 today.

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Remember, observation, interpretation, and application is the process we should use when looking at the Word of God.

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Spend time in observation before we interpret, and then of course make sure we're interpreting correctly before we seek to make an application of the Word.

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And if you want to do our daily Bible reading with us, you can go to sgfcjacks.org, that's Sovereign Grace Family Church home page, sgfcjacks.org, and you can get a copy of our daily Bible reading, reading through the New Testament books in the order that we believe they were written through 2020.

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A daily Bible reading during your weekday mornings.

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All right, so yesterday I finished up telling about how through God's mercy and grace I had been led to take a stand on the doctrines of grace at Forest Christian Church, which is the previous name of our church.

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And by the way, if you're just coming in and you haven't heard our previous days, I'm telling this story in five parts.

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So if you didn't hear the previous days, you might be a little confused, but ultimately this is the story of how Sovereign Grace became a Reformed church, because we weren't always.

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We used to be Forest Christian Church.

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We were originally part of the Disciples of Christ movement.

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We left the Disciples of Christ in 99.

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I became the pastor here in 2006, and in two years I was preaching verse by verse.

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I was preaching expository preaching, and I was convinced as a Calvinist, I was convinced in Reformed theology.

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I believe that's what the Bible taught.

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And it's important to note at this point that I wasn't bucking the trends of our church theologically, because our church had not had a formal statement of faith upon which we rested.

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It was always sort of all over when it came to theological positions.

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And I mean, I've had many conversations with people who've been in the church for a long time who said there were always a variety of theological positions in the church, and that's fairly common when you're dealing with the Disciples of Christ.

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There's, you know, you have some who are more conservative, some who are more liberal, but there's churches that have variations.

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So when I came in and was preaching verse by verse, preaching the Bible, there were folks, of course, who did not like that, who did not want that to happen, and God gave me the will and the intestinal fortitude to take a stand.

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And again, it wasn't me.

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It was all God.

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And God went before me.

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He stood for me.

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And like I said, I told that story last time.

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But then after it was over, it was like, well, what now? Okay, I've taken a stand.

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After I took the stand, there were several months of sort of some infighting.

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There were accusations about what Calvinism meant.

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There were accusations about what it meant to be Reformed.

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There were accusations.

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One of the ones I remember—and I do want to address this—one of the ones that was probably the most insidious argument against Calvinism that I remember was that Calvinists believe babies are going to hell.

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I remember hearing that.

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I remember being told that to my face.

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Well, you're a Calvinist, therefore you believe babies are going to hell.

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And I said, well, that's not true that all Calvinists believe that.

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And I went into my office, and I got a book off the shelf.

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And the book was by Dr.

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John MacArthur, and it's entitled Safe in the Arms of Jesus.

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And it is a book about infants who die in infancy.

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And John MacArthur is a Calvinist, and he wrote the book on the subject.

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And so I said, here, here is proof that not all Calvinists believe that babies die, babies who die, go to hell.

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That's a ridiculous claim to say that all Calvinists believe that.

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And it is ad hominem.

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It's attacking.

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It's a false accusation.

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It's attacking the person saying you believe something that you don't believe.

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And it's besmirching the character of Calvinists, because all Calvinists don't believe that.

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Now, having said that, I do want to make a point, because I was asked this by one of our listeners, and I thank you.

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You know who you are, who listened.

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And I was asked, well, what is the position? What is the biblical position on babies? And I want to address that, because this is a very sensitive subject.

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And I'm coming to you as one who has suffered alongside my wife through the pain of miscarriage.

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And so we have both—and my wife and I have discussed me talking about this, so this is not a secret.

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Our church prayed for us.

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We were thankful for the church praying for us.

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And we believe that baby was alive, and we believe that baby was a real child from the moment of conception, and we believe that was a human being, not just a clump of cells.

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And we had to consider the fact that we believe that our baby is safe with Christ.

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But we also understand this, and this is why Calvinism is often attacked in this regard, is we believe in original sin, which means we believe that people are sinners from conception, because we believe that we are conceived in the image of Adam.

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We bear the sin nature of Adam.

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And the Bible tells us very clearly that in Adam all die, in Christ all are made alive.

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So no one comes into this world innocent.

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Even a perfect, beautiful little baby does not come into this world innocent.

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So the big question then is, well, do you believe they go to heaven? I still believe that babies go to heaven, but not because they're innocent.

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I believe that babies go to heaven based on a couple of scriptural passages that are encouraging to me.

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When David lost his child, he was grieving the loss of the child, and he said that the child can't come back to him, but that he could go to the child, and we believe David was going to heaven.

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So that's a reference to that.

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But I do want to say that there are some Calvinists who believe in elect infants, and what that basically means is that God is free to choose to save adults.

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He's also free to save children, and so God is free to save how he chooses.

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And I believe that's true.

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I do believe.

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Here's the thing that I think we all have to come to this understanding, and it's the Genesis, I believe it's chapter 18, when Abraham is speaking to the Lord, and Abraham says to the Lord, will not the judge of the universe do what is right? And the question assumes the answer, and the answer is yes.

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The judge of the universe will do what is right.

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So when it comes to infants who die in infancy, God will do what is right.

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When it comes to children who die, God will do what is right.

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So like I said, I like to believe and be comforted by the fact that I believe that infants who die in infancy go to heaven.

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If I find out I'm wrong about that, if I reach heaven and God tells me I'm wrong, then I will be comforted in the fact that he is still God and that he is still good.

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And I do want to add a caveat to this, because there is something that has to be considered.

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Some people have used the belief that infants go to heaven as a reason to justify abortion.

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They've said, well, isn't it better to abort the baby and just send him or her on to heaven? That is, to me, a disgusting twisting of the goodness of God.

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Why not just kill the baby and send the baby on to heaven? If someone were to say that that's the right way to do, that justifies abortion, I think that that would be wrong.

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And so therefore, like Dr.

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James White has made the point, if you believe that all babies go to heaven, then abortion becomes a way to send babies to heaven, and you have to be careful with that.

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You have to be careful that you don't allow your belief that babies go to heaven to justify the murder of babies.

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That would be the wrong thing to do.

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But as I said, that was one of the questions, and I know that may have seemed like a side note, but the reason why I brought that up, one, because I was asked the question, but two, ultimately because that was one of the questions that was coming up within the Church.

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Well, do you believe that babies go to hell? And my answer to that was, one, no, I don't necessarily believe that, but two, even if that were true, God is still God, and God is still good.

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You see, the implication of the question is that God has to somehow fit into our standard of goodness.

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That is not how God operates.

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God does not have to meet with my standards.

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I have to meet with his standards.

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He is the ultimate righteous one, not me.

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So therefore, the question has inherent within it a wrong understanding of who we are and who God is.

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So that's the first thing.

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That was one of the questions that came up, and there were others—questions about free will, questions about, well, if God predestines, why do we evangelize? And all of those are questions that, in future episodes of Coffee with a Calvinist, I want to go through and deal with it, but because this week I'm telling the story, I don't have time to stop and break down every one of these questions.

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But I do want to kind of tell you what I did, because this is how we ended up dealing with this issue.

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There were a lot of questions.

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There were a lot of people.

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I mean, we were now a church that was going in the direction of the Reformation.

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Some people never heard of the Reformation.

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Some people didn't know who Martin Luther was.

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Some people didn't know who John Calvin was.

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All they had ever heard was, you know, Calvinist, bad, bad, bad.

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That's, you know, Calvinism kills churches.

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They'd not heard any—and some of them not even heard that.

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So what are we going to do now? So what we did is, several months after we took the stand, I took a stand, and several months after God began to confirm that this is the direction we're going as a church, a few families left—not very many, but a few families left.

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Now that we've kind of basically sort of starting over in 2008, it's almost like it was a church split.

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But I don't want to say that it was a church split, because a church split is like half and half.

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This was not half and half.

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This was only a couple families out of a, you know, our church of around 100 people.

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So it was enough to make a dent, but it wasn't enough to make what I would call a split.

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And so what we did is we had a conference, but not like a normal conference where, you know, we do a couple lessons at night and maybe have a dinner or something.

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We had a whole week where every night of the week, I would preach on the doctrines of grace.

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We set up a time starting Sunday night.

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I was going to preach all the way through Friday night, and I was going to preach every night on the doctrines of grace.

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And then during the day, we would have lunch prepared, and you could come and ask questions, any questions you wanted to, about what was preached the night before.

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So we had people coming in the evening, hearing the Word preached, taking notes, and then the next day we would have sandwiches or something, you know, a glass of iced tea and a sandwich, and we would sit down, and I'd pull out my chalkboard or my whiteboard and questions, questions, questions, and we would deal with those questions.

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And there were a few people who were very interested.

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They wanted to know, what is this thing that's being taught? There were a few people who seemed like, you know, it didn't really matter to them.

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It wasn't a huge deal.

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But the people that came were the ones who I knew were the ones who either were supporting what we were doing or they needed to be convinced.

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So either way, I took it as a blessed opportunity to preach through these truths, preach through this series of lessons, what we call the Doctrines of Grace.

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And I remember that.

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I remember that, hopefully, until the day I die, that it was a blessed opportunity because I would preach at night.

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The next day, I would sit down.

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The people would have their questions written down, and we'd answer the questions.

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And it was all kinds of things.

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Well, if what you're saying is true, is God responsible for evil? If what you're saying is true, why hand out gospel tracts? If what you're saying is true, why even come to church? If God's going to choose who He's going to choose, what does what I do impact anything? And all of those questions were the same questions that I had when God was leading me to the Doctrines of Grace.

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That's the thing.

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I was prepared because I had been there.

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I had been on the Arminian side.

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I had been in the position of making the argument for absolute libertarian free will and making the argument for those things.

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So it was a blessing of God that I had the opportunity to hear the same questions coming out of other people's mouths that had come out of my mouth.

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And by God's grace, He led us through that.

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And it was that that caused us to step back and say, you know what? We're not the same church we used to be.

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We need to begin to look at making some changes as a church.

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And God led me to do almost a year worth of preaching on the subject of ecclesiology.

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Ecclesiology is the doctrine of the church.

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And on tomorrow's episode, I want to talk about how we went from Forest Christian Church to Sovereign Grace Family Church through the process of studying ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church.

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It wasn't so much the Reformed theology, it was Reformed understanding of what the church is that led us to our most significant change.

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So again, I hope that these daily encouragements have been a blessing to you.

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I hope this story is helping you know more about how God has worked in the life of our church and how He can also work in your life.

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If you have questions, please send them in.

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And again, we are here every weekday morning at 630 for Coffee with a Calvinist.

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I hope this has been a blessing to you.

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Again, my name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 630 a.m.

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on YouTube and Facebook.

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If you enjoyed this lesson, please take a moment to respond by hitting the like button, leaving a comment, and subscribing to the channel.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.

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May God bless you.